My take has always been that creaking, barely-functioning infrastructure is cost-effective. That the risk of blackouts is a cost that utility companies would prefer to shift to their customers because getting robust systems with built-in redundancy is expensive.
It's kind of like my other favorite "cost of insurance" born by the public example. Up until September 11, 2001, US domestic airlines consistently opposed more stringent security screening procedures because they felt the added inconvenience to their customers would be bad for them. Of course, all opposition ceased once the insurers (general public) had to pony up on a claim.
Now we're in the opposite end of the field in terms of risks and rewards. Given existing terrorist activities, people have such an enhanced perception of the threat and value so little the cost of their existing civil liberties that they've traded some essential liberties for temporary security. Not having had a bona fide authoritarian government abuse power makes people lazy.
Is it just me, or has recent spam flavor included random sentences (not just random word lists) that are meant to sound like a plausible person is on the other end?
Then, embedding some link to spam inside, in an attempt to get the S/N filters to let it pass?
but 'Millitary outsourcing' has been going on so long they have a word for it... Mercenary
Yes, even internal to nations the military duties are often outsourced by paying someone who needs the money.
How many of the sons and daughters of current politicians serve in the military?
Given the many lives at stake, the only people even possibly qualified to make grave decisions about going to war, of authorizing people to kill and to risk being killed, are those that have experienced those same horrors firsthand.
There are no guarantees that decision makers will be wise, but if their children were in the fray of the battles they instigate it would bring a lucidity to their decision-making process that otherwise could be missing.
It was simply more profitable to sell a program that requires frequent updates for each new threat.
Apart from distinguishing it as something the user installs more unwittingly and later decides is something bad they don't want, a virus isn't much different from any other piece of software.
It's software that, because it is installed, helps the authors obtain something from the user.
Parasites are just a matter of degree. No black and white, Good and Evil, just data on the disk.
If software systems become like biological organisms, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that a sufficiently benign virus that provides enough benefits to outweight its costs might become incorporated into future software systems as a matter of course, much like mitochondrial DNA gets passed on in humans although it is theorized to have originated as a separate organism.
IIRC, the OS is supposed to do some caching (in the old days a sync command helped flush buffers onto disk before shutdown), but it's not an explicit kind of think like this persistent memory-mounted filesystem, which I've always thought was interesting.
If you ever think about how inefficient it would be for the system to go read/bin/ls every time you typed the ls command you could see where caching is a damn good idea.
Doing read-ahead, write-behind and maintaining coherency isn't easy, from what little I understand.
Doug Balog, an IBM vice president, noted that 70 percent of the world's data are still housed in mainframe computers."
Even more interesting from my perspective is the fraction of the world's money supply in these proven beasts.
Sure there are PC's with a few financial databases made up from some spreadsheet, but I think most of the world's money is entrusted to IBM mainframes that were the first computers to enter banking in a big way.
Probably much of the $33 trillion dollars in total U.S. debt [govt+corporate+personal+mortgage] is kept track of in these mainframes, too.
Considering the age of the technology, it plays a vital part of our economy. It's probably much more important for mainframe customers to have live backups, disaster recovery plans, etc. compared to most computer users.
[This must have been in the works a few weeks anyway. I have to wonder how the MS-Sun rapprochement talks intertwined with ESR's proposal to make Java truly open source...]
My impression is that only the very best lawyers make those wonderful salaries. Many lawyers scrape along making little more than engineers.
Even many MDs are not making the kinds of money that they might have expected to see. A GP in a rural area doesn't make anywhere near what a surgical specialist does in a large urban area.
At least here in the United States, the marketplace would find alternatives real quick of the price of gasoline were at European levels $5/gallon. A monetary incentive motivates.
Better to tax gas heavily, use the revenue to reduce an atrocious deficit, fund research into alternative energy sources, decrease demand, decrease emissions, than to wait on our butts until an inconvenient decision by OPEC and we have to fund another quarter trillion dollar military venture into the oil-rich Mideast where the USA is just so well-liked.
With the onset of age and injuries, there's good reason for professional athletes to negotiate high salaries. After age 40 or so, only a few of them can continue making money with endorsements. The rest have to live off interest income generated from what they earned in their short careers.
Acting is a similar "get lucky for a short while" profession. I'd negotiate to the hilt, too, because there's no guarantee of future employment at anywhere near the same rate of pay. The typecasting effect can also strangle the future of TV actors careers (consider Superman).
Most actors, like most athletes and musicians, do not make a good living at it. Those few lucky enough to make to the top should have a chance to get as much as they can while the good times last. It's what any smart person would do under similar circumstances.
Spoken like someone without a grasp of what can sometimes cause overtime to occur in a retail environment.
Oftentimes things go wrong.
An early fast food job I had on the late shift (closing) constantly had people "not show up for work that day".
The few people there at midnight would sometimes have to stay until 3am to finish the job shorthanded.
I will say that they didn't like to give people overtime, and the assistant managers were often tasked with checking to insure people weren't delaying too much to punch out at the end of their shift, but my paper timecard had the hours written on it, rounded to the nearest quarter hour, even when it was 8 hours and 10 minutes.
There's probably more attachment to the command line among UNIX users because it's the only surviving OS old enough to inculcate so many users.
My first UNIX experience was on vt220 terminal, where GUI meant the curses library.
There are a few other legacy OS with a command line history, VMS, MVS, and DOS, which are still a workhorses just because they are so useful at what they do.
The trump card to prove the utility of the typed command remains programming languages such as C++. Ultimately, when you want to get really close to a machine, you can't just rely on menu-picking and dragging and dropping boxes on a screen.
Google already has a special advantage in knowing what kinds of search terms consumers are throwing at them, as well as which of the presented links are being clicked from which IP addresses. That kind of knowledge could actually help them to maintain their grip on the search market compared to newcomers.
By offering an email service where they can comb through the email archive using search technologies, they can determine, for example, whether ad-sponsored emails work, what makes them work better, etc.
The last thing the scientific process needs is karma whoring.
The horse has already left the barn on this one. Tenure processes in many academic departments essentially dictate a heavy publishing record, which is not necessarily synonymous with publishing quality.
I appreciate that some reviewers would feel hesitant to give a brutally honest assessment of an article if they weren't guaranteed anonymity (let's just assume competitors abusing anonymity to pan articles of colleagues that compete for the same funding sources is not a problem).
A digital signing and certificate system could still be used to preserve anonymity. A designated editor with some level of trust and prestige fields prospective articles, distributes them to reviewers, and adds up points and presents articles making a Score:4 or above.
Maybe long after the fact, when a specific correlation could no longer be made, the editor might thank a very long list of reviewers. The aggregate prestige of the reviewers would reflecton the prestige of the journal.
The article does a good job of picking the misleading and false statements about Unix and Linux in various leading textbooks.
And these are just the vague and false statements about one particular category of knowledge - the Linux OS. It begs the question: if they can be mistaken about this area and not taken the time to get their facts straight, what other areas are getting hand-waving instead of well-researched facts?
More than anything else, this points out some embarrassing shortcomings in these textbooks. Professors picking textbooks for their students would do well to pick better ones than these.
that there would still need to be peer-review before publishing,
Absolutely.
For people new to a field, it really helps if the articles they see published have undergone scrutiny by experts before being released.
So what's the equivalent?
Papers get digitally signed by their authors.
Then, as an author accumulates a good reputation because of his published work, other authors will seek to have him review and put his stamp of approval onto their papers. [This is a lot like getting well known scientists to become editors of a dead-tree journal].
To put in/. terms, it would be a more refined moderation system, so that you could see where the mod points came from (a +3 from some new friends of gnaa or goatse posters would not be as valuable as a +1 moderation from the real Bruce Perens or Alan Cox, for example.)
The catch is that you also have to power it,... keep a redundant backup...for all of them.
Nah.
I'm betting when people request to look at their old email you could just make shit up and pretend it was what they put in the archive. Most people I know wouldn't notice.
Microsoft recently collaborated with the Fed to produce a set of best security practicees documents for Windows.
Of course, what I'd like to say from a process such as this is:
A complete, free, public, open specification of all of the Windows API, including all the corner cases, and the application-related libraries, so that security testing could be absolutely guaranteed to be complete.
If not, then we move from Point A, where we trust the statements of the vendor (hardly an impartial party), Microsoft in this case, that security is good enough to Point B, where we trust the statements of the vendor compounded by statements from the government that "yes" the vendor's security is "good enough".
Oh well, if it works so well for meat inspection it's gotta work as well for software inspection, eh?
<esr>the most valuable gift you can give your users is the luxury of ignorance -- software that works so well, and is so discoverable to even novice users, that they don't have to read documentation or spend time and mental effort to learn about it.</esr>
If only life could be so carefree.
Personally, I think that debugging behavior and figuring things out should always be a process of climbing a linear learning curve.
Note, unfortunately, that some novice users will inevitably encounter difficulties that are related to deep problems. Some of that can't be helped. What can be helped is providing a smooth ramp of learning how to probe the problem and fixing what is wrong.
And what would be really nice, too, is if Google kept a problem:application,symptom directory around that users and code developers could consult, you know with rankings about the most common symptoms of a problem, what the resolutions were, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
telnet to port 80
Ooooo. Sounds like some fancy-dancy user interface to me. That telnet's probably got escape sequences an everything.
Us real trogs use netcat.
Navigator
The KDE folks always figured that Konqueror came after the Explorers and the Navigators.
Maybe Mozilla should outdo them to the next step with the logical follow-on to a Konqueror.
You know, either Oppressor or Insurrection.
That's about the choice, anyway...
Exactly.
I'm not sure why, but PerlMX let it through earlier today.
My take has always been that creaking, barely-functioning infrastructure is cost-effective. That the risk of blackouts is a cost that utility companies would prefer to shift to their customers because getting robust systems with built-in redundancy is expensive.
It's kind of like my other favorite "cost of insurance" born by the public example. Up until September 11, 2001, US domestic airlines consistently opposed more stringent security screening procedures because they felt the added inconvenience to their customers would be bad for them. Of course, all opposition ceased once the insurers (general public) had to pony up on a claim.
Now we're in the opposite end of the field in terms of risks and rewards. Given existing terrorist activities, people have such an enhanced perception of the threat and value so little the cost of their existing civil liberties that they've traded some essential liberties for temporary security. Not having had a bona fide authoritarian government abuse power makes people lazy.
Is it just me, or has recent spam flavor included random sentences (not just random word lists) that are meant to sound like a plausible person is on the other end?
Then, embedding some link to spam inside, in an attempt to get the S/N filters to let it pass?
Star Office 7.0, the latest and most impressive version of Sun Microsystems' low cost alternative to Microsoft Office.
Okay. I'll believe that things have gradually gotten better and better on the Linux desktop.
So, then, now, how much incentive does Sun have now to push OO.o and Star Office further into this key part of Microsoft's bread and butter business?
but 'Millitary outsourcing' has been going on so long they have a word for it... Mercenary
Yes, even internal to nations the military duties are often outsourced by paying someone who needs the money.
How many of the sons and daughters of current politicians serve in the military?
Given the many lives at stake, the only people even possibly qualified to make grave decisions about going to war, of authorizing people to kill and to risk being killed, are those that have experienced those same horrors firsthand.
There are no guarantees that decision makers will be wise, but if their children were in the fray of the battles they instigate it would bring a lucidity to their decision-making process that otherwise could be missing.
It was simply more profitable to sell a program that requires frequent updates for each new threat.
Apart from distinguishing it as something the user installs more unwittingly and later decides is something bad they don't want, a virus isn't much different from any other piece of software.
It's software that, because it is installed, helps the authors obtain something from the user.
Parasites are just a matter of degree. No black and white, Good and Evil, just data on the disk.
If software systems become like biological organisms, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that a sufficiently benign virus that provides enough benefits to outweight its costs might become incorporated into future software systems as a matter of course, much like mitochondrial DNA gets passed on in humans although it is theorized to have originated as a separate organism.
Okay, I didn't RTFA.
But, with monster monitors coming out and some people already squinting, aren't they planning to move to scalable icons?
I recall hearing of SVG icons for Gnome and KDE and of some, uh, SVG-like XML language that MS was developing...
If you ever think about how inefficient it would be for the system to go read /bin/ls every time you typed the ls command you could see where caching is a damn good idea.
Doing read-ahead, write-behind and maintaining coherency isn't easy, from what little I understand.
Doug Balog, an IBM vice president, noted that 70 percent of the world's data are still housed in mainframe computers."
Even more interesting from my perspective is the fraction of the world's money supply in these proven beasts.
Sure there are PC's with a few financial databases made up from some spreadsheet, but I think most of the world's money is entrusted to IBM mainframes that were the first computers to enter banking in a big way.
Probably much of the $33 trillion dollars in total U.S. debt [govt+corporate+personal+mortgage] is kept track of in these mainframes, too.
Considering the age of the technology, it plays a vital part of our economy. It's probably much more important for mainframe customers to have live backups, disaster recovery plans, etc. compared to most computer users.
The article hints that there may be more to follow.
You mean, like that Jon Schwartz is leaving, to be replaced by John Loiacono?.
[This must have been in the works a few weeks anyway. I have to wonder how the MS-Sun rapprochement talks intertwined with ESR's proposal to make Java truly open source...]
why is it that virtually no USA based media is reporting
Perhaps many of the large commercially-dominate media outlets have underreported the story.
But one US based news outlet had an interview with Sibel Edmonds
I thought you guys had freedom of speech?
Mostly, we do have free speech.
However, the loudest voices that you hear are not necessarily the most free.
All the kids will be going to law school,
It seemed that way.
My impression is that only the very best lawyers make those wonderful salaries. Many lawyers scrape along making little more than engineers.
Even many MDs are not making the kinds of money that they might have expected to see. A GP in a rural area doesn't make anywhere near what a surgical specialist does in a large urban area.
But there are lots of alternatives.
At least here in the United States, the marketplace would find alternatives real quick of the price of gasoline were at European levels $5/gallon. A monetary incentive motivates.
Better to tax gas heavily, use the revenue to reduce an atrocious deficit, fund research into alternative energy sources, decrease demand, decrease emissions, than to wait on our butts until an inconvenient decision by OPEC and we have to fund another quarter trillion dollar military venture into the oil-rich Mideast where the USA is just so well-liked.
they end up destroying their livelihood
With the onset of age and injuries, there's good reason for professional athletes to negotiate high salaries. After age 40 or so, only a few of them can continue making money with endorsements. The rest have to live off interest income generated from what they earned in their short careers.
Acting is a similar "get lucky for a short while" profession. I'd negotiate to the hilt, too, because there's no guarantee of future employment at anywhere near the same rate of pay. The typecasting effect can also strangle the future of TV actors careers (consider Superman).
Most actors, like most athletes and musicians, do not make a good living at it. Those few lucky enough to make to the top should have a chance to get as much as they can while the good times last. It's what any smart person would do under similar circumstances.
Spoken like someone without a grasp of what can sometimes cause overtime to occur in a retail environment.
Oftentimes things go wrong.
An early fast food job I had on the late shift (closing) constantly had people "not show up for work that day".
The few people there at midnight would sometimes have to stay until 3am to finish the job shorthanded.
I will say that they didn't like to give people overtime, and the assistant managers were often tasked with checking to insure people weren't delaying too much to punch out at the end of their shift, but my paper timecard had the hours written on it, rounded to the nearest quarter hour, even when it was 8 hours and 10 minutes.
the *nix command line
There's probably more attachment to the command line among UNIX users because it's the only surviving OS old enough to inculcate so many users.
My first UNIX experience was on vt220 terminal, where GUI meant the curses library.
There are a few other legacy OS with a command line history, VMS, MVS, and DOS, which are still a workhorses just because they are so useful at what they do.
The trump card to prove the utility of the typed command remains programming languages such as C++. Ultimately, when you want to get really close to a machine, you can't just rely on menu-picking and dragging and dropping boxes on a screen.
massively scalable, distributed computing platform
Rather, how about
which makes the most sense to me.Google already has a special advantage in knowing what kinds of search terms consumers are throwing at them, as well as which of the presented links are being clicked from which IP addresses. That kind of knowledge could actually help them to maintain their grip on the search market compared to newcomers.
By offering an email service where they can comb through the email archive using search technologies, they can determine, for example, whether ad-sponsored emails work, what makes them work better, etc.
The last thing the scientific process needs is karma whoring.
The horse has already left the barn on this one. Tenure processes in many academic departments essentially dictate a heavy publishing record, which is not necessarily synonymous with publishing quality.
I appreciate that some reviewers would feel hesitant to give a brutally honest assessment of an article if they weren't guaranteed anonymity (let's just assume competitors abusing anonymity to pan articles of colleagues that compete for the same funding sources is not a problem).
A digital signing and certificate system could still be used to preserve anonymity. A designated editor with some level of trust and prestige fields prospective articles, distributes them to reviewers, and adds up points and presents articles making a Score:4 or above.
Maybe long after the fact, when a specific correlation could no longer be made, the editor might thank a very long list of reviewers. The aggregate prestige of the reviewers would reflecton the prestige of the journal.
The article does a good job of picking the misleading and false statements about Unix and Linux in various leading textbooks.
And these are just the vague and false statements about one particular category of knowledge - the Linux OS. It begs the question: if they can be mistaken about this area and not taken the time to get their facts straight, what other areas are getting hand-waving instead of well-researched facts?
More than anything else, this points out some embarrassing shortcomings in these textbooks. Professors picking textbooks for their students would do well to pick better ones than these.
that there would still need to be peer-review before publishing,
Absolutely.
For people new to a field, it really helps if the articles they see published have undergone scrutiny by experts before being released.
So what's the equivalent?
Papers get digitally signed by their authors.
Then, as an author accumulates a good reputation because of his published work, other authors will seek to have him review and put his stamp of approval onto their papers. [This is a lot like getting well known scientists to become editors of a dead-tree journal].
To put in /. terms, it would be a more refined moderation system, so that you could see where the mod points came from (a +3 from some new friends of gnaa or goatse posters would not be as valuable as a +1 moderation from the real Bruce Perens or Alan Cox, for example.)
The catch is that you also have to power it,
Nah.
I'm betting when people request to look at their old email you could just make shit up and pretend it was what they put in the archive. Most people I know wouldn't notice.
Microsoft recently collaborated with the Fed to produce a set of best security practicees documents for Windows.
Of course, what I'd like to say from a process such as this is:
<esr>the most valuable gift you can give your users is the luxury of ignorance -- software that works so well, and is so discoverable to even novice users, that they don't have to read documentation or spend time and mental effort to learn about it.</esr>
If only life could be so carefree.
Personally, I think that debugging behavior and figuring things out should always be a process of climbing a linear learning curve.
Note, unfortunately, that some novice users will inevitably encounter difficulties that are related to deep problems. Some of that can't be helped. What can be helped is providing a smooth ramp of learning how to probe the problem and fixing what is wrong.
And what would be really nice, too, is if Google kept a problem:application,symptom directory around that users and code developers could consult, you know with rankings about the most common symptoms of a problem, what the resolutions were, etc.